{"id":2698,"date":"2008-03-17T09:26:34","date_gmt":"2008-03-17T03:43:51","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2012-05-07T10:56:33","modified_gmt":"2012-05-07T04:56:33","slug":"natural-goat-ca","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/natural-goat-ca\/","title":{"rendered":"Natural Goat Care"},"content":{"rendered":"

On my little homestead near downtown Oakland, CA, I’ve dabbled in chickens, bees, turkeys, rabbits, and pigs (i.e. eggs, honey, meat, fur pelts, and wonderful manure for the garden). Recently the dabbling got a little more serious: two Nigerian Dwarf goats<\/a> named Bilbo and Bebe (the one thing missing was milk; And I love milk. And goat cheese). Trouble was, I didn’t know anything about goats, what they eat, how they behave. Luckily, a goat herder told me about this guide published in Australia. It put my fears to rest.<\/p>\n

With all of the other farm animals (including the pigs!), it’s mostly a matter of throwing down some food, making sure everyone has water and enough space, and we’re all good. Goats turned out to be way more complicated than any other animal on the farm. They have psychological needs. They have a rumen for digesting food. They can get sexually transmitted diseases. They have hooves that need to be trimmed. They are a long-term relationship, which — from day one — kept me up late at night worrying. With this guide, I’m far less worried. And now that Bebe is pregnant, in a few weeks we’ll have milk!<\/p>\n

Bonus tip: I order all manner of goat-related items from Hoegger’s<\/a>. Recently, I ordered a natural de-wormer, made with Worm Wood, Gentian, Fennel, Psyllium, & Quassia; buckets of goat minerals–calcium, phosphorus, salt and magnesium, selenium, and vitamin E; a kid bottle and some colostrum (in case Bebe has a million babies); and a bag of kelp in bulk (I’ve noticed the goats love wakame, but at $5 a bag, it was breaking me, so this should do the trick).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guide to goats<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[12],"tags":[1350],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2698"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2698\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}